Avvale | Case Study | The Future of Interaction with Service Stations

While they expertly deliver innovation and quality to their customers, Callaway Golf’s previous planning and reporting tool wasn’t making the cut. To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.

Together with Avvale, Callaway Golf successfully implemented SAP Analytics Cloud across their global enterprise in just 6 months. Now, Callaway Golf has a single, consolidated planning solution that has enabled streamlined expense and asset plans so they can focus on what they do best– revolutionizing the sporting world with cutting edge equipment.

The Challenge

Our client has always been dedicated to providing its customers with the most advanced and intuitive user experiences. For this reason, in 2014, the company embarked on an innovation journey with the Avvale team, culminating in the development of a groundbreaking mobile application for fuel payments. Over time, both customers and their needs have evolved, prompting the company to transition from merely introducing a new purchasing method to the ambition of digitizing the entire customer experience. The goal was to centralize the entire range of services offered by its fuel stations into a single app. This standardization would be implemented consistently across the entire country and, looking ahead, throughout the European territory.

The development of the application presented two main challenges. On one hand, there was the technical complexity of a heterogeneous solution composed of processes distributed across multiple components that needed integration and governance. On the other hand, as a platform intended for end customers, it required a high level of reliability and prompt proactivity in resolving any issues.

The Approach

Recognizing the potential for significant innovation, the Avvale team developed a cutting-edge mobile application using AWS cloud services to ensure an exceptional user experience at fuel stations. The app features an intuitive interface that simplifies access to connected digital services.

Payments are now easier and more flexible, with options including credit cards, fuel cards, and other integrated external payment methods. The app also automates the process of sending electronic invoices for VAT-registered users. Moreover, it allows users to join digital loyalty programs, eliminating the need for traditional plastic cards and making it easier to earn rewards. The system also incorporates gamification, providing customers with vouchers from both the company and external partners.

Avvale utilized AWS CloudOps best practices to propose a centrally managed multi-account environment via AWS Organization. This setup allows for the isolation and segmentation of resources based on use cases (e.g., development, testing, production).

The architecture is deployed in multiple availability zones (multi-AZ) to ensure scalability and resilience, using AWS VPC. Security was a top priority, so resources are deployed in different subnets (public and private), with security groups configured for each virtual machine and macro application object (frontend, backend, etc.), and an AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) for external connections.

Using AWS IAM, access and permissions are managed in a granular manner, adhering to the principle of least privilege. Additionally, a robust monitoring system was implemented using AWS CloudWatch for logging and AWS CloudTrail to track and report user activities.

At the same time, Avvale incorporated a FinOps approach to cloud cost management, in particular we applied:

tagging policies for resources allocation;
activation of AWS Trust Advisor to identify unused resources and opportunities to lower your costs.

Thanks to AWS Optimization HUB we received recommendations on cost optimization such as the activation of saving plans.

The Challenge

Before integrating SAP Analytics Cloud, Callaway Golf's planning landscape centered around SAP's legacy planning solution, Business Planning and Simulation (BPS). While BPS met Callaway Golf's planning needs for many years, the enterprise began to experience limitations with their old solution:

Disconnected plans across the board: As Callaway Golf expanded and acquired new brands, planning processes greatly differed across the enterprise with some business units using Excel spreadsheets and others using legacy solutions for planning.
Outdated planning functionalities: The existing legacy planning solution lacked many modern functionalities. Among them, salary calculations and asset depreciation automation needed improvement. As a result, it became difficult to create detailed and accurate forecasts across the globe.
Significant IT support: The legacy solution required continuous management from IT to maintain runtime. IT had to carve out a full day every week to manually maintain the solution.
No single source of truth: Various departments and brands used different data sources, which led to data silos across the organization, making it difficult to gain a clear picture of the enterprise's planned expenses.
Rigid user interface: Legacy forecasting system was difficult to navigate and lacked working functions and calculations across the board, such as planning on depreciation and existing assets, adding vendors or members on the fly, and breaking down their cost center expense planning forecasts.

The Approach

With Avvale experts on their side, Callaway Golf laid out the following goals for their new planning landscape with SAP Analytics Cloud:

Crowdsource and consolidate plans across the enterprise to gain a global overview of their planned expenses and expand the input capabilities to each responsible owner.
Leverage elevated planning functionalities to create faster and more accurate forecast cost center expense and asset reports. The ability to customize calculations enhances and automates the reporting metrics.
Harness the power of self-service analytics to alleviate IT from the burden of simple maintenance and data entry requests, so they can focus on high-ROI tasks.
Maximize user-driven admin capabilities to control the management of calculations and forms.
Create new KPls driven by the business needs.

When SEM-BPS was the center of Callaway Golf's planning landscape, flexibility was a huge factor that was missing. SAP Analytics Cloud contains powerful scenario planning capabilities that help organizations quickly uncover actionable insights to make data-driven decisions. For Callaway Golf, SAP Analytics Cloud's modern planning functionalities provided users with the ability to:

Add members on the fly
Plan on existing as well as planned assets and automatically calculate the depreciation of values
Test "what-if" scenarios for deeper analysis by creating private versions of plans
Customize the solution based on their current business process
Perform driver-based calculations
Empower users to execute end-to-end planning scenarios, without the help of IT

The Impact

This app serves as a vital strategic tool for our client, significantly enhancing customer acquisition and fostering loyalty among existing customers. The seamless digital experience it offers greatly improves user interaction, shortens processing times, and simplifies operations across various services.

With an intuitive and user-friendly interface, the platform has revolutionized the refueling process by replacing traditional forecourt terminals for payment and dispenser selection. Customers benefit from real-time monitoring of operations, gaining greater control over their loyalty profiles and transaction visibility, which promotes transparency and trust.

Furthermore, the app has introduced an advanced reward system by integrating closely with the company's business partners, offering customers a wide range of rewards within an engaging, gamified experience.

Thanks to the use of advanced AWS tools for cost control, it was possible to identify optimization opportunities, significantly reducing costs, without impacting application performance.

In conclusion, our customers benefit from a 35% reduction in infrastructure management time, as well as streamlined operations through the centralization of previously separate procedures.